Buem's First Lady

A Woman Who Made a Region
"She reshaped her community's view of women's potential through quiet determination."
There are lives that are simply lived, and there are lives that become a kind of argument - a living proof that the circumstances into which a person is born need not determine the ceiling above which they will never rise. Ernestine Ama Agbenyega belonged entirely to the second kind.
She was born in 1926 into the rural Volta Region of Ghana, the third girl and fourth child of cocoa farmers Edward Darko and Rosa Otomo. The world she entered was not designed to expect much from her. Girls in that time and place were not sent to school. The idea that one of them might, decades later, be remembered as the First Lady of an entire region - not through marriage to a powerful man, but through the sheer accumulated force of her own character, her faith, and her refusal to accept the limits others had decided were sufficient - would have seemed, in that village, like an extravagant fantasy.
And yet that is exactly what she became.
This book is drawn from the biographical account preserved by her family, and from the words of the people who loved her most closely: her children, her grandchildren, her sons-in-law, her nephews, and the friends and community members whose lives she altered simply by passing through them. It is a literary memoir in the truest sense - not a catalogue of dates and events, but an attempt to trace the inner life of a woman who shaped everything she touched without ever raising her voice to announce that shaping was occurring.
What emerges is a portrait of someone whose power was always quiet, whose authority was always earned, and whose love was always - in the precise word her eldest son Senyo used - unconditional. She fed people. She prayed for people. She taught people. She taught Sunday school into her eighties. She reached the age of ninety-nine without, by every account, ever losing the quality of presence that made a visit from her feel like a blessing.
Read this book as the record of a life that mattered. Because it did. Enormously, and in ways that will continue to unfold long after these pages have been read.

John Agbenyega Williamson
London, United Kingdom